Object-oriented design best practices

Programming Best Practices

We can learn by our own experience, we can use our common sense, we can learn by more experienced developers when contributing to an existing project. But to speed things up, reading a good old book is also a good idea.

Object-Oriented Design Heuristics

For OO design, the well-known Design Patterns book is often advised. But most of the design patterns are not often applied, or are useful only for big applications and frameworks. How often do you create an Abstract Factory or a Facade?

On the other hand, the book Object-Oriented Design Heuristics, by Arthur Riel, discusses in details more than 60 guidelines − or heuristics − that can be applied to all projects, even for a small codebase with three classes.

Example of an heuristic:Keep related data and behavior in one place.

If a getter method is present in a class, why is the data used outside the class? The behavior implemented outside the class can maybe be implemented directly in the class, so the getter can be replaced by a higher-level method.

Other example:Distribute system intelligence horizontally as uniformly as possible, that is, the top-level classes in a design should share the work uniformly.

By following this heuristic, god classes should be avoided. An example of a class that can be split in two is where some methods use only attributes A and B, while some other methods use only attributes C and D. In other words, if a class has non-communicating behavior, that is, methods that operate on a proper subset of the data members of the class, then the class can be split.

All the heuristics can not be followed all the time. That’s why they are called “heuristics”. But when an heuristic is violated, there should be good reasons behind that decision, and the developer should know what he or she is doing.

Event-driven programming

One missing concept in the book is event-driven programming.

With GObject, we are lucky to have a powerful signal system. It is a great way to decouple classes. When an object sends a signal, the class doesn’t know who receive it.

Conclusion

Programming best practices are useful to maintain a good code quality. Object-Oriented Design Heuristics will give you the knowledge to better write object-oriented code, either for small projects, big projects or API design in a library.